Video premiere: Distractor, ‘Video Games’

Kevin Bronson on December 12th, 2017

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Distractor is a group of oddball twentysomethings who deal in unhinged synth-punk (think: the caffeinated offspring of Devo/Talking Heads) and have mined their wild imaginations to become DIY audio-visual auteurs. The road that has taken them from an Orange County garage in early 2015 to the album “This Time I Got It Figured Out,” which will be released next year on Burger Records, has not been an easy one.

Not long after Will Sipos and Glen Christensen first conceived the band in 2015, Distractor released its debut album. And videos, plenty of videos, like the crazy ones for the title track “Devotion” and the one for “Spaceman.” (Sipos and Distractor’s Sean Campos were also responsible for this wild one for The Garden.)

Then, in August, lead singer Christensen was diagnosed with cancer. In early October, he died, at age 25. “That was the end of Distractor,” Sipos says. “We clocked back into our jobs and sat there, crying a bit, and hating the world.” For a time, they distracted themselves by joining up with Levi Prairie as Blue Flowers, but eventually the lineup of Sipos, Prairie, Campos Ronnie Dunmore and Colin McKibbin recorded the elusive second album, with Campos producing, and decided to be Distractor again.

The story is told in this mini-documentary.

“These last two years, we really had no idea what we were doing and we were hardly sure which way was forward,” Sipos says. “If anything, the making of this record was the process of us getting back on our feet. It’s not about how low you feel. What ends up defining you is can you say … ‘Last time was bad. But this time will be different. I almost lost it all, but this time I got it figured out.’” The album is dedicated to Christensen.

Which brings us to the new visual for “Video Games,” a brilliant romp in which a video game controls real life, and which turned out be more a challenge than Distractor originally thought. “We had spent so much time on our last music video that I wanted this music video to be just a super simple and straightforward idea … like put on some overalls and pretend we’re farmers,” Sipos says. “Of course, by the end of it all the video ended up being the most complicated of them all. Go figure.”

||| Watch: The video for “Video Games”